Review: The Casterglass Heir

The Casterglass Heir by Kate Hewitt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The third child, and only son, Sam Penryn gets his story. Sam has always felt a disappointment to his father, he prefer the outdoors to books which is at odds with his intellectual father. After a deeply shaming episode where he tried to cheat on his A' level exams and was expelled, Sam has avoided Casterglass at all costs happy to travel the world doing crazy stunts (like climbing a mountain with a fridge on his back) for charity. But when the family calls he must (eventually) answer and he is making the best of a bad job by setting up a glamping site and a rope climbing course for the more adventurous.

Then one day a blast from the past arrives at Casterglass, Rose Lacey, the feisty, happy-go-lucky girl Sam met in New Zealand arrives and announces that she is pregnant with Sam's baby. Rose has had a hard life, her mother left her when she was very young, and she spent her childhood galivanting around the world with her father rather than attending school. Then suddenly when she was eighteen he left her to cope on her own and she's been holding down a series of cleaning and bartending jobs ever since. Life ha taught her never to rely on other people, but the news that she is pregnant has forced her to reassess her priorities.

One niggle, Sam is supposed to be thirty-three years old yet he reads like an eighteen year old, maybe twenty-one at a push. He's still haunted by being bullied by the village children when he was ten years old and has conflagrated his father into someone who is perpetually disappointed in him.

This started very slowly for me and I found both Sam and Rose quite difficult characters to like, again they both 'read' much younger than their supposed ages.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher Tule in return for an honest review.

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